I'm no foodie, just an ordinary chick with a liking for basic, home-cooked meals. That's why I love my Edmonds Cookery Book, and why I've spent three years cooking every single recipe.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Spuddy salad

We were given a ham each for Christmas from work - which, while I appreciate the gesture, is quite a lot for one person to eat. I didn't cut into it until we got back from Blenheim, at which time I gave Mum and Dad a sizeable chunk to take back to Timaru. Another chunk went into the freezer, and I've spent the past week trying to find ways to use up the rest.

I've had ham sandwiches, ham and eggs, and added ham to just about everything I've eaten - including the mushroom salad left over from the other day (a tasty addition, by the way). It wasn't until today that I got around to making a potato salad (p178) from the potatoes I hadn't used for my Christmas meal.

Ham is not a listed ingredient in the Edmonds potato salad recipe; it's not even among the suggested variations. Still, I usually add meat of one kind or another to a potato salad, so I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't work in the Edmonds version.

I started by getting the potatoes cleaned and cooked, then hard-boiled an egg. Both potato and egg then went into the fridge to chill. Meanwhile, I mixed up my dressing. The recipe offered three possibilities for the dressing: mayonnaise, French dressing or yoghurt dressing, each of which would have given the salad a completely different flavour.

I opted for the yoghurt dressing (p184), seeing as I'd already made the other two. It's a simple mixture of plain, unsweetened yoghurt, lemon juice, mustard powder and seasoning. I stirred these ingredients together and put the dressing in to chill as well.

Some time later, I put all my chilled ingredients together to make the salad. I chopped the potato a bit smaller, added the chopped egg with some sliced spring onions, mint, the chopped ham and the dressing. All this needs to be combined reasonably gently, so the potatoes don't fall to pieces.

It was a pretty good potato salad. I think I'd prefer it without the mint, but I'm not sure what I'd put in instead. Parsley, maybe? The yoghurt dressing tasted better than I'd expected - and it's certainly lower in fat than a standard mayonnaise. I liked the added ham - in fact I think the salad would have been a bit boring without it. But then, that's the beauty of a potato salad (in fact, pretty much any salad) - you can mix and match the ingredients to suit yourself.